Steven Gore - Absolute Risk

“That’s a lie,” Faith said.

Gage now looked at her full-on and saw that her eyes were bloodshot and the skin around them raw.

“He didn’t resist because he didn’t want others murdered in his place.” Faith lowered her head. “I tried to convince him to flee, but he refused.”

“His death was a condition of the Central Committee’s cooperation. They couldn’t risk him becoming a rallying point for further uprisings.” Shi spread his hands and then looked at Gage. “People die all the time in order to preserve order.”

“How can you be sure that they won’t decide to make your death a condition of their future cooperation,” Gage said, “or a means to withdraw it?”

Shi smiled. “Because I’m more mythological than real. Some people even doubt that I exist, and one doesn’t kill a myth so easily.”

“Then why didn’t you try to save him?”

“There wasn’t time. It was only a matter of hours before the army fragmented,” Shi said. “Part of it siding with the rebels and part siding with the government. There would’ve been a civil war.”

He then gestured toward two of the four seats around the table.

“Maybe it would’ve become a revolution,” Gage said, after they all sat down. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“When I was young, but now I know that it isn’t possible.” Shi shrugged. “I’ve learned that the concept itself is meaningless. Even your own revolution left everything the same for most of your people, the destitute, the slaves, and the Indians. And a revolution here would do the same, except for the million or two who would die in the process.”

The plane’s jet engines engaged with a low rumble and then a wail.

Shi gazed toward the airport lights, then sighed and said, “In any case, no one in China will miss a simple farmer.”

Gage stared at the profile of the old man, his face paled by fluorescent lights, its lines etched deep, his withered body shelled by a uniform that no longer fit, and saw in his wet eyes that Shi would miss Old Cat as much as Faith.

Their bodies jerked as the plane began to roll toward the runway.

“Where are we going? “ Gage asked, pointing toward the now whining engines.

“To complete fulfilling promises I made to your wife and to Old Cat. To your wife, I promised to send Ibadat Ibrahim to the States to care for her husband, and to send Ayi Zhao back to her home in the mountains. The garrison will protect her.”

“And to Old Cat?”

“I promised to allow your wife to burn incense for him on Mount Emei Shan, near his home, for he has no family left to do it.”

In a single sweeping move, the plane swung onto the runway and accelerated, and thirty seconds later it rose from the tarmac. Gage watched the lights of Beijing spread out beneath them, then contract as they turned west, toward Chengdu. When he looked back, General Shi had fallen asleep.

“The two of them weren’t that different,” Faith whispered. “Neither one of them had a vision for the future. They both felt helpless, as if they’d somehow lost traction in the world.”

“Except that one of them had his finger on the trigger of the largest army in the world,” Gage said, looking at Shi, “and history didn’t pull it, he did.”

Faith stared at Shi for a moment, then nodded and removed her cell phone from her pocket and held it in front of her.

“Old Cat once showed me the phone they’d given him. He’d never touched one before the rebellion began. He told me that some children had explained to him that it had a GPS. He stared at it and said that it could tell him on what street corner he was standing, but couldn’t tell him his place in the universe.”

She pressed a key and the screen lit up.

“The kids also showed him how he could get news from all over the world…” Tears came to her eyes and her body curled forward. Gage reached his arm around her shoulders. “And he wondered aloud how anyone could bear to witness that much suffering.”

They remained silent for a few moments, then she returned the phone to her pocket and said, “I think that at the end, all of existence seemed to him to be absurd and strange and alien.”

“Does that mean he’d resigned himself to dying?”

Faith’s eyes narrowed in thought, and then she said, “Only in the sense that wisdom teaches people to accept the inevitable.”

Two hours later, Shi awoke as the plane landed at the military base northwest of Chengdu. He pointed toward the back of the plane and told them that a guide and a driver were waiting, then rose and walked into the cockpit. Seconds later, the rear door opened into daylight and the staircase ratcheted down. A soldier returned Gage’s phones, money, and identification at the top of the stairs. As they arrived at the bottom, a young man climbed out of a jeep.

Faith reached for him, and they held each other’s hands as she introduced Jian-jun to Gage.

They rode in silence as they skirted the western edge of the occupied city, past the ruins in the special economic zones, and then into the foothills, the road narrowing from the four lanes that had passed through crosshatched suburbs, down to two lanes, and then from pavement to dirt tracks through hillside villages.

It was clear to Gage that Jian-jun didn’t trust the driver, perhaps viewing him as General Shi’s spy, perhaps assuming that if he knew where Old Cat’s body lay, he’d been one of those who’d buried him-and did so in a place too remote to become a shrine for the masses.

Faith shrugged when Gage cast her a questioning look.

Jian-jun sensed the movement, and then looked back from the front passenger seat and said, “Old Cat’s ancestors made pilgrimages to a little monastery on the western flank.” He pointed toward the driver. “He knows where it is.”

Gage caught glimpses of the Emei Shan mountain range from different angles. They seemed to be circling the mountain rather than aiming toward its foot, where Buddhist pilgrims usually began their climb.

Two hours later, they ascended into mist, then through it into low clouds. The green of the pine trees faded to gray against the charcoal of the deep forest. And an hour after that, they made a long, curving turn and the road funneled into a path. The driver parked and they got out of the jeep. The cold thin air told Gage that they had ascended eight or nine thousand feet since leaving Chengdu.

The driver pointed down the path and spoke to Jian-jun in Mandarin.

“It’s about a forty-minute walk,” Faith told Gage, as they began the hike, Jian-jun in the lead and the soldier at the rear.

After just a few steps, the mist and shadow closed the trail behind them, and a few steps after that monkeys revealed themselves, shrieking at the invaders and leaping from branch to branch above them. Others chattered in the distance, as though warning the rest of the troop hiding in the forest.

As they approached a wooden bridge, the crash of a waterfall drowned out the monkeys’ screams, and a couple of hundred yards after they crossed the stream, the trail came to a rocky overlook. They could see an open-walled, six-sided pinewood temple, no bigger than a living room, on the opposite side of the valley. Its sweeping roof tiles were covered in moss and lichen and their upturned corners seemed to reach into the canopy of trees. And beyond it in the distance, the steep peaks of karstic mountains emerged above the mist.

It reminded Gage of looking across the Mediterranean inlet at the limestone pillar near where Michael Hennessy had come to rest, and he realized with an ache in his chest that the only kind of incense Elaine would ever burn for her husband would be in the form of suffering and rage and guilt that would continue to smolder. He felt he understood her well enough to know that convicting Wycovsky and his Chinese accomplices for his murder wouldn’t extinguish her pain.